Life’s journey is fraught with twists and turns, false starts, and doubling-backs. It’s a messy affair, one that’s not easily charted or understood. Like Odysseus making his rambling way home after the Trojan War, Justin Evans navigates this zig-zagging course in his Sailing the Nameless Ship. Soundly lyrical yet subtly narrative, these poems find a grounded energy in a bittersweet longing for home that is belied by a thrilling apprehension of what’s to come. — Jeff Newberry, author of Brackish. In Sailing This Nameless Ship, Evans explores similar terrain to Louise Gluck's Meadowlands - that is, he uses the myth of Telemachus and Odysseus to tell the story of his own journey. In stark language with glimpses of simple beauty, he invites the reader into both sweeping vistas and the intimate moments of his life. — Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, and, Unexplained Fevers. “My lungs are nothing— / empty shells working in a foreign land,” Justin Evans confesses in Sailing This Nameless Ship, the veteran poet’s third and most compelling collection to date. Marking a seasoned maturity in craft, vision, and voice, Evans cuts deeper and soars higher into his continuing exploration of human consciousness, unraveling how we relate to one another as family, lovers, warriors, storytellers, and friends. The narratives, autobiographies, and refrains which compose this collection sing again and again that reunion is an act of dissolving entirely into the solution of the world, as “The art of war is / the art of biography. We grow into both.” This book will sail straight into you, and ask to be named. — Brent Goodman, author of The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, and Far from Sudden.